125 Years Strong – An IUOE History

INTERNATIONAL UNION OF OPERATING ENGINEERS
Well-Prepared for a Comeback
Poor national economies that struggled to
fully recover from the Great Recession
severely stifled much of the I.U.O.E.
again as many of its members endured
resultant hardships, including protracted
periods of unemployment, into and during
the early 2010s. In response, the union worked
relentlessly on Capitol Hill and a number of
other fronts to secure legislative assistance for
its members and all workers, with particular
emphasis on job-creating measures.
Among myriad job-creating measures the
union vigorously promoted at that time, it
played a key role in having Congress pass
legislation that applied Davis-Bacon prevailing
wages on all $111 billion of U.S. Department
of Energy-supported commercial loans to
developers and owners of innovative energy
projects. Into and during early 2010, seven
substantial loan guarantees totaling almost $11
billion that would produce jobs for I.U.O.E.
members were issued.
Other legislation for which the I.U.O.E.
successfully lobbied and were passed into
law in 2010 included the American Workers,
State and Business Relief Act that extended
unemployment and COBRA benefits to
workers through the end of the calendar
year; and the HIRE Act (Hiring Incentives to
Restore Employment) that among other actions
extended the transportation law through
the end of the year and transferred nearly
$20 billion from the federal government’s
general fund into the Highway Trust Fund, an
important provision for operating engineers.
As poor employment conditions lingered,
on September 14, 2010, the I.U.O.E., along
with the plumbers and steamfitters, laborers,
teamsters and electrical-workers unions; the
A.F.L-C.I.O.; and the Pipeline Contractors
Association, announced the signing of a
Members of I.U.O.E. Local No. 14 and Local No. 15 of New
York City help build the new One World Trade Center (or
Freedom Tower), the main building of the rebuilt World
Trade Center complex in Lower Manhattan that would
replace the Twin Towers of the original World Trade Center
destroyed in the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001.
union-friendly Project Labor Agreement
with the TransCanada Corporation (now
TC Energy) for a significant portion of U.S.
construction of the proposed $7-billion
Keystone Gulf Coast Expansion Pipeline
Project (also known as Keystone XL). The
agreement would provide TransCanada with a
well-trained workforce in the United States for
the ambitious project to build a new, 1,700-
mile crude-oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada,
to Gulf-shore refineries in Texas.
Cranes operated by Local 14 and Local 15 members place
the final components of the spire at the top of the new
One World Trade Center on May 10, 2013, making the
structure a total height of 1,776 feet – a reference to the
year in which the U.S. Declaration of Independence was
signed. The building would open on November 3, 2014.
Members of I.U.O.E. Local No. 701 in Oregon lift a retired Boeing 747-100 jetliner onto the top of the underconstruction
Evergreen Space Museum’s Wings & Waves Waterpark in McMinnville, Oregon, in 2010, after
which four large slides were installed to run from inside the fuselage to a landing pool 62 feet below.
More than 1,000 members of I.U.O.E. Local
No. 178 of Dallas-Fort Worth, Local No. 450 of
Houston and Local No. 627 worked more than
2-million total manhours to help complete the
487-mile Gulf Coast segment of the Keystone
XL from Cushing, Oklahoma, to Port Arthur,
Texas, between 2012 and 2014. However, in
January 2012, the U.S. Department of State
delayed a decision on issuing a permit for the
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